Oracle Mobile Cloud Service

This is hard—moving a huge number of customers from on-premise systems to cloud systems while continuing to run the business. Hard but there are few alternatives. The last time anyone seriously tried to rip and replace was the Y2K conversion of back office systems to accommodate the new century’s date format. The effort nearly clobbered many companies.

This time vendors like Oracle have no interest in repeating the mistake so as they migrate their installed bases to the cloud, they are being careful to provide interim steps that lessen the load and the complexity though probably not the costs. In announcements made by founder, Chairman, and CTO, Larry Ellison, Oracle outlined a series of cloud services designed to help all manner of customers—from partners to enterprises—to migrate to cloud systems. But note here that migration does not automatically mean going to a multi-tenant architecture like Salesforce and many other vendors. For Oracle, moving to the cloud means only a literal translation from premise to cloud. Call it step one.

For many customers that’s enough because it will be a heavy lift moving from applications they may have been using for 15 or more years. The alternative would be to build new cloud apps on Oracle’s platform but that would take many years and dollars for some. The solution of moving the existing applications to the cloud and then contemplating a rewrite seems inelegant but in fact it makes a lot of sense. Many customers will realize significant savings by sending parts of their datacenters to the cloud—monies they can apply to new business process support.

Here are the services announced and my take on them.

Oracle Database Cloud—Exadata Service. This is very interesting because the Exadata hardware supporting this service is worth the price of admission. Exadata provides orders of magnitude speedups for most database functions because it operates in memory virtually all the time. So big reports, analytics and other database operations run much closer to memory speeds than disk speeds—in other words about a million times faster. That’s nice especially if you need to find more cycles to dedicate to data encryption for security.

Oracle Archive Storage Cloud Service. Archives are necessary and far from glamorous but somebody’s got to do it and I can see many enterprises happily paying whatever Oracle charges.

Oracle Big Data Cloud Service and Big Data SQL Cloud Service. If you need Hadoop and NoSQL databases in your enterprise, this is for you. Though this is another less-than-sexy service, its need is readily apparent for large enterprises and small. It’s also probably more than many will need but that’s likely to be viewed as a good thing.

Oracle Integration Cloud Service. Everyone needs integration services but it’s surprising to see this elevated to the scale of a cloud. Many other vendors get by with their platforms and APIs and that’s telling. If you’ve been an Oracle customer since green screens on a VAX days then this is something you might need to make sense of your less than third normal form relational DB.

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service. This is a developer tool useful in developing and deploying mobile apps. It sounds great but it begs the question, why can’t we just define apps once and generate running code for multiple target platforms? The answer is that some apps don’t have definitions that plug into code generators, they’re real code. So this is another tool for helping move and preserve what’s out there.

Oracle Process Cloud Service. I was very happy to see this because I think process orientation is where we’re all headed. The applications that are moving to the cloud in this migration and many others are built around capturing and manipulating data. But the future is about what you do with the information you glean from data that produces useful information about customers. This information will, among other things, enable businesses to better serve customers by being more intimately involved in their moments of truth resulting in bonding, the holy grail of modern business. This service is the tip of an important iceberg and it provides justification for all of the other services.

All together the Oracle Cloud Platform and Infrastructure services present a vivid picture of the state of modern business and computing. There’s a huge legacy base that has to keep working even as it is being moved. You could sniff that Oracle is enabling the legacy systems to continue operating rather than replacing them en mass but that’s an impractical idea.

The announcements Ellison made show a customer centric company focused on helping customers make generational transitions safely and economically. That might not be your first conception of Oracle. Yes, they will make money on this—I am a big fan of the motivation possible when money is involved. For many companies concerned about betting their business on new technology (been there, done that, got the scars and the Tee-shirt) this should be seen as a gradualist approach to the last generational transition of their working lives.